


Day 30: Recovery

by Aelaer



Series: Whumptober 2019 [30]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Avengers, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt Stephen Strange, Injury Recovery, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Protective Avengers, Recovery, Rescue, The Avengers Are Good Bros, Whumptober 2019, Wong is a Good Bro (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 08:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21352996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aelaer/pseuds/Aelaer
Summary: The world exploded into a series of reds, whites, purples, and blacks that blinded his sight and made him shut his eyes at the dizzying cacophony. It was accompanied by the sound of pulsing energy, explosive fire, and cracked stone, and beyond all that there were shouts of surprise and chaos.When Stephen dared open his eyes again, the abominable horror reaching out from the inky darkness, ready to tear into him and consume him, was gone. He squeezed his eyes shut once more, then opened them yet again; yes, it was really gone. The portal was broken, the ritual interrupted by gold and red streaks, loud sounds, and figures he couldn't quite make out in his current state.A small part of his mind wondered if this was an illusion by the eldritch abomination that had entered his mind. It was very possible; with such timing, it did seem a little too good to be true.
Relationships: Stephen Strange & Avengers Team, Stephen Strange & Wong (Marvel)
Series: Whumptober 2019 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1510820
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	Day 30: Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> I did say at the beginning of this series that Endgame was sorta… not really paid attention to. So yeah, same mantra.
> 
> This is the final part of the "Occultists" series, and this will make more sense if you read the first parts:
> 
> Part 1: [Day 9: Shackled](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21076163)  
Part 2: [Day 13: Alt #16 - Bound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21130214)  
Part 3: [Day 16: Alt #7- Winded](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21179225)  
Part 4: [Day 18: Muffled Scream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21204038)  
Part 5: [Day 28: Beaten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341818)

The world exploded into a series of reds, whites, purples, and blacks that blinded his sight and made him shut his eyes at the dizzying cacophony. It was accompanied by the sound of pulsing energy, explosive fire, and cracked stone, and beyond all that there were shouts of surprise and chaos.

When Stephen dared open his eyes again, the abominable horror reaching out from the inky darkness, ready to tear into him and consume him, was gone. He squeezed his eyes shut once more, then opened them yet again; yes, it was really gone. The portal was broken, the ritual interrupted by gold and red streaks, loud sounds, and figures he couldn't quite make out in his current state.

A small part of his mind wondered if this was an illusion by the eldritch abomination that had entered his mind. It was very possible; with such timing, it did seem a little too good to be true. That would be a very good nightmare, and he knew such beings were certainly capable. Was this one? It probably could do something like that, but it seemed more of the world-exploding type of demon rather than something so personable. It _had_, however, singled him out by name across the multiverse...

Stephen slowly shook his head out of his rambling thoughts. He needed to pay attention in case this wasn't an illusion or fever dream or anything of the sort. There were definitely people fighting, that much was obvious. Definitely Kamar-Taj sorcerers, and quite a few of them at that. That red stuff… that was Wanda Maximoff. She used Chaos Magic, didn't she? He wondered if she would be willing to let him study her abilities a bit more, after all this… but wait, Maximoff. Avengers? Would the Avengers really bother with him? This wasn't even Earth.

Mmm, world-ending, though. He did say that to Wong, didn't he? Wong didn't like the name, either (and now it was a name Stephen refused to directly think about in his head, not after seeing the demonic creature); now he understood Wong's horror. Was the powerful demon still in his head? All this truly could just be an illusion perpetrated by the entity to give him a false hope before ending his miserable life—

"Doctor Strange," a soft voice said behind him, and it caused him to startle (and jerk his wrists, which _really_ hurt, dear fuck, how hard had he tugged at the ropes?). "It's Natasha Romanoff. Clint and I are getting you out of here."

He wasn't quite sure what he should say, at least when he could speak again. 'Thank you' seemed rather inadequate. Would asking them to prove they were real be too rude?

Before he could think of a good answer, the ropes at both wrists were cut and oh God it was agony, absolute agony, and he didn't even try to catch himself. Thankfully two sets of hands caught him before he completely did a faceplant on the stone altar (and in his own blood— that was a surprising amount of blood). They maneuvered him to the back of the altar, away from the explosions and colors and shouting. Clint was taking off the awful, awful gag as Natasha said into an earpiece, "Need a portal."

Wait, no, there was still fighting going on. "Need to help," Stephen murmured the moment he could speak.

"You need to sit tight until we get you into the medbay," Clint retorted.

He opened his mouth to argue, but suddenly Wong was there, just a few feet away. He blinked at him, but Wong was already forming a portal in between himself and the small group. Before Stephen could say anything, his friend pushed it towards them.

Oh. This must by the so-called medbay. It smelled very much like a medbay. They were still sitting on the floor, though now Natasha and Clint were trying to pull him to his feet and truth be told, Stephen really didn't feel like walking.

Everything hurt. He let the two of them support him as he took a deep breath. When he looked up, he was being ushered into a room by nurses and doctors he didn't recognize. They started asking questions, talking, and fuck it, no matter if this was an illusion or reality, he wasn't going to just _stand by_ as they talked about his state over him.

"Hypovolemic, but not in shock," he interrupted one of the nurses as he was helped to lay on his uninjured stomach upon the bed. "Well… maybe mild shock at most. Definitely not— didn't lose over thirty percent. Didn't hit arteries." It was just the back; there were many more deadlier places to bleed from. He'd seen more lost blood in the ER time and again. He was _fine_.

Well, mostly fine.

So long as this wasn't an illusion, that is. He looked at his surroundings as they started the initial work on him. The tech was more advanced than he was used to at the Metro-General, but not so alien that it was completely incomprehensible. Natasha and Clint were in the corner of the large room, saying… something he couldn't hear. That made sense with the distance and the noise around him. So that was good, okay. At some point the staff got him hooked up to an IV, oximeter, and a sensor he wasn't familiar with for his other vitals. Something from Wakanda, perhaps… that was also a good sign. Good signs.

Stephen slowly began to relax, a sensation which only increased when some sort of painkiller hit his system. It wasn't a heavy opioid, but it turned the flaming pain into something that felt more like a sting than anything and he could work with that. They applied topical painkillers as they cleaned out and sutured his cuts shut, as well.

"Y'know I could just heal it with magic," he mumbled when Clint and Natasha came to his bedside.

"All your good sorcerer healing buddies are fighting," Clint said cheerfully. "I've never seen such a dangerous looking LARP group in my life."

"Hah," he mumbled. "Good precaution, though; there's a lot of them… the occultists."

"Yeah, we saw," Natasha pointed out. "The good news is that we had enough people between your guys and us to keep them all occupied while we found you and snuck you out. You were very easy to find, though."

Stephen made a face, and it wasn't at the work they were doing on his back (and now his wrists, which was proving to definitely sting). "You interrupted… at a good time." He swallowed. "The nick of time. It was… close."

Clint crossed his arms. "Wong was saying something about a world-eating entity. I'd call bullshit, but, well… maybe I'd have called bullshit ten years ago, is what I'm saying."

Natasha shot him a brief look of amusement. "What he's trying to ask is if it was that bad."

"It was that bad," he answered immediately. "I've… I've only encountered such immense power once."

"Thanos?" she asked.

"No, not Thanos."

Clint made a face. "Yeah, your job sucks, Doc."

"It's usually not this bad," he mumbled. "I get to do magic, after all."

"We all have bad days," Natasha reassured him. "We're going to let the doctors finish patching you up, Doctor Strange. I expect others are going to come see how you're doing as soon as they're finished up with those occultists."

Stephen mumbled an affirmative and closed his eyes as the two left him to the doctors and nurses.

* * *

About two hours later, an impressive crowd came into his room.

"Hey Doc, look, I brought flowers," Tony said in greeting, lifting up the genuinely ugliest bouquet of flowers Stephen had ever seen in his life.

"You brought me a bunch of thistles," he said slowly.

"Well, yeah. You know, for a speedy recovery, good health, protection, and the other things these flowers are supposed to mean." He shrugged and placed them on the counter beside the bed.

Stephen wasn't anywhere near an expert on flower meanings, but he was pretty sure that was not what thistles meant at all. "Who told you that?"

Tony nodded his head towards Wong, and Wong, bastard that he was, kept his face completely and utterly stoic. But the bastard had not only helped rescue him, but had also brought the cloak; the cloak had already swept past the group and circled Stephen before settling across the hospital bed.

In the background, Rhodey was checking something on his phone and shooting Wong a knowing look while Wanda and Vision remained wisely out of the whole flower conversation.

Stephen cleared his throat. "Right, well, thanks. Is everyone okay?"

"For the most part," Tony answered. "A couple nasty cuts, but nothing life-threatening. Worst part was probably whatever Sam was cursed with while pushing one of your guys out of the way."

"Minoru appreciates the gesture, but he shouldn't have done it," Wong said.

Rhodey made a face. "Did you see the size of that blue flamey thing coming at her? Sam can handle it."

"Sam's going to be in Kamar-Taj for the next week recovering from the side effects," Wong retorted.

"Sam could use a vacation," Vision said, speaking for the first time.

This conversation was getting a bit ridiculous. "Okay, I'm glad that for the most part no one was badly hurt," Stephen said. "I appreciate the news, but uh, I don't think I needed five of you to tell me that."

Wanda smiled. "We're here to see how you are doing, Doctor Strange. We were worried about you."

Oh. He paused as he processed that. He was ninety-five percent certain that it wasn't an illusion before, but now he was definitely certain because he didn't think either his mind would have come up with that, and the eldritch entity would definitely have not come up with the thistles.

That was a real relief. Though these people, some only acquaintances, wanting to see him at all he found a bit mind-boggling.

Tony boggled him further when he said, "And it's only five because even we have to listen to the doctors here when they say only five of us can visit at once."

Stephen slightly shook his head. "And, what, you five pushed yourselves to the front of the queue?"

"Hah," Tony retorted. "Vision could just phase through. But nah, they," he gestured to the other four, "were the real MVPs of that fight. Wong contacted us and got things going, of course. Rhodey got S.H.I.E.L.D. off Wong's back in the way he does best, Wanda's magic did something with the portal that I'm not even going to try to make sense of, and Vision figured out he could block people from being hit with those weird blue flamey things with his Mind Stone Version 2.0."

It wasn't anything resembling one of the Infinity Stones, of course, but that didn't stop Tony's ridiculous naming conventions. Stephen shot an amused look at Vision's expression, then asked the engineer, "And you?"

"Well, I brought you flowers, of course."

He snorted, then looked from him to Wong and Wanda. "Even if Tony doesn't want to know about Wanda's magic, I do. What happened?"

Wanda gestured to Wong to explain, and he answered, "From what I could tell, the portal was made from the elements of some sort of Chaos Magic, though those exact mechanisms I've not seen in our reality. It would have taken us some time to dismantle it, but as her magic branches from Chaos Magic as well, she was able to break it apart in something less than ten seconds."

Stephen saw the math; without that quick dismantling, he would have been gone before anyone had a chance to get to him. It was quite possible that the entity may have even been able to sustain the portal's opening once it was finished with him. "You saved my life," he told her.

She shook her head. "Oh, no, it was a group effort. There were many occultists there."

"No, what I mean is, the—" He swallowed at the memory, then pressed forward, "the thing was reaching for me when everything exploded in color and noise."

"The explosions were probably Tony and me," Rhodey admitted. "Sam too, come to think of it."

"They were very good distractions," Vision said.

"Regardless," Stephen continued, "It was reaching for me. The portal was far from it, but it had an endless— an endless uh, arm of some sort. If you had not disrupted the portal, it would have taken me maybe ten, fifteen seconds later."

A brief silence fell over the group. Wanda looked a bit stunned.

"So, uh, good timing on our part, then," Tony commented.

Stephen swallowed. "Yeah. Very good." He looked down at his hands and bandaged wrists, then at the cloak lying quietly and patiently. He didn't have his sling ring, of course, but now that Wong was here…

As he started to get out of bed, Rhodey said, "Hey, where are you going?"

He stared at the colonel. "Back with Wong? I don't have my sling ring so I needed to wait for him."

"The doctors want to keep you overnight," Tony pointed out.

Stephen rolled his eyes. "What, to monitor? I'm fine; see, blood pressure's back to normal, oxygen levels normal, heart rate normal. It was not nearly enough blood loss to worry about."

Wong gave him an even look. "You need rest and time to recover, Stephen."

"Yeah, and I can recover in my own bed or even the Kamar-Taj infirmary just as well as I can here."

"The moment you get back to either, you're going to immediately see how Mr Wilson's faring. We both know that the moment you see him, you'll throw yourself in study to see if you can help him recover faster."

"I—"

"Don't even try to argue that you wouldn't."

And now everyone else in the room was smirking in various degrees; even the android looked vaguely amused. Stephen frowned at all of them.

"Fine, I'll stay overnight for monitoring. But at sunrise, you— or anyone else from Kamar-Taj— need to come and pick me up."

"In the morning," was Wong's infuriating answer.

"_Sunrise._"

"Maybe after breakfast," Wong mused aloud.

Stephen glowered at him.

"Doctors really do make the worst patients," Tony quipped.

"I'm ready for the next group of well-wishers, now," was Stephen's answer. Tony laughed and made his way to the door. As the others followed him out, Stephen called, "Miss Maximoff?" She lingered at the door, and after the others left, he said, "Thank you. Truly."

She offered a small smile. "I am more than happy to help you, Doctor Strange. I know you would do the same for me."

"Stephen, please," he said. "I was actually hoping, if you would allow it, to study your magic further. I can offer you my own expertise, or any knowledge from the library at the New York Sanctum and most of Kamar-Taj, in return."

Her smile widened. "I think that could be of help to us both."

He inclined his head. "That is my thought as well. Chaos Magic is not heavily practiced in Kamar-Taj and it could be a valuable learning experience for us."

"And I know I could learn much from your order. I was amazed at the magics I saw performed yesterday by so many different people. I would love to."

"Great," he said, smiling.

Wanda nodded, then paused. "But only after you are fully recovered!"

Stephen groaned as she left the room with a chuckle.


End file.
